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Soft LOA

Before I write about the new news on our adoption journey I’m going to back up to last week, well really the last couple of weeks. If I am completely honest, I was going through a tough time with how slow our adoption process was moving. I felt stuck, stuck in a dry desert is the best way to describe it. Last week we had been waiting 70+ days with no word on where our dossier was. My fears began to consume me.

“What if our paperwork fell behind a desk on the other side of the world? What if something was missing in our dossier? What if China decided the extra doctor’s note they needed wasn’t enough?What if they decided we can’t adopt Max after all because of my health issues?”

I knew these thoughts weren’t from the Lord, but yet they were there, and no matter how hard I tried to escape them, I couldn’t. So not only was I feeling stuck in an “adopting waiting desert” I felt like I was in a spiritual desert as well.

This is where I want to say THANK YOU to all my my adoption friends who are on this journey with me. Thank you for praying and encouraging me when the wait was so dry. I have been so blessed with friends (who I haven’t even met face to face) who knew the right words to say and understand all these crazy acronyms and wait time! Thank you for your prayers and encouragement!

I wish I could say that everything is all better, that the waiting isn’t tough anymore and that I feel so close to the Lord right now, but I can’t. What I can say is that is over the last few days I have been able to slowly give those above fears to the Lord (once again) and slowly come to a place of being peaceful, even among the hardships of waiting for our adoption to be final.

AND, today, we received the AWESOME news that we received our soft LOA! This means our Letter of Acceptance to adopt Max is on its way from China to our agency! Just this past Sunday, our Life Class at church had a prayer and praise event. We spent a good portion of the class praying for different requests and receiving our LOA was one of them. Thank you for all of your prayers!

What does this all mean?! Once our agency receives the LOA they will overnight it to us, we will sign it and send it back to them along with our I800 paperwork. This will be a request to the US to specifically adopt Max. There are a few other steps after that, but we will hopefully be meeting our son in the next 8-12 weeks!!!

In the meantime, we will have some fundraising to do AND a ton more paperwork. Here is a picture of how the puzzle is coming along:

We only have 51 pieces left until we complete the puzzle! If you would like to help out, you can purchase a piece for $10 by using our AdoptTogether account. To read more about our puzzle fundraiser go here.